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yes he did ;'] , Tyan is very cool and efficient with bios troubles users report .
but Gigabyte is not that bad . both brands are not having same targets and not the same cpus or ram , most consumers are using wiwi and it is better for them when focus is on what they use , at least to get the better for the lowest price.
Linux os is good but sometimes its creators have too much the focus on the free software rules . so they even do not like "hardware-drivers" . i agree and prefer this kind of point of view , at least to prevent incompatibilities . but look at M$ that produces none and "signs" them ... that should not be done for free...

The bios really won't be that different between vendors; if you ask any of them they will probably all tell you some variant of "you're on your own with Linux". The chipsets are the same and most of the bioses are just stock or slightly tweaked reference images from award or insyde, etc. The thing is, MS did not support APSM officially for a long time so most vendors never validated it since it wasn't a requirement for 90% of their markets. Various vendors implemented it directly in their drivers for specific devices and that's how we ended up where we are. It's not really realistic for vendors to go back and validate old hardware for a feature which was "unsupported" at the time. It's a waste of resources since there's no new revenue attached to it.

Uh, forgot to add. Regarding other motherboard vendors. Unlike Gigabyte, that states their motherboards are for Windows only, other state that their motherboard may be compatible with non-windows systems, but they can not guarantee that. And if you happen to have a problem, they will listen it up and if its their fault they will correct it, regardless of OS you use. That was my experience with ASUS.

Gigabyte doesnt state that its Windows only, i read from my motherboard specifications:

Due to different Linux support condition provided by chipset vendors, please download Linux driver from chipset vendors' website or 3rd party website.
Most hardware/software vendors may no longer offer drivers to support Win9X/ME/2000/XP SP1/SP2. If drivers are available from the vendors, we will update them on the GIGABYTE website.

So? If that is how a company wants to present itself to the world, they deserve to get a bad reputation for brushing off customer complaints instead of investigating them. They want to sell you stuff, due diligence should apply to their side, not yours.

Because that would be the case for all companies? Too many of you think we still live in 1970's times where you could still get a direct line to somebody that knew WTF they where talking about instead of getting someone reading from a script in in New Delhi. So basing your product choice on that opts you out of pretty much the entire electronics industry and most industry in general. So will you be joining the Amish? If so can I have your stuff? Especially since companies like Asus and Gigabyte go above and beyond what most of the other mobo companies are willing to do for their customers.

Nope, due diligence is on the part of the guy doing the article, because if some random overclocker forum can get engineers from these companies to check in on the forums and take feedback from them then so should we, but it seems Michael is incapable of getting a good relationship with them and it's obvious why from the condition of the site even though I'd guess that there are far more of us then there are overclockers out there and as such should have more weight then they do.

So what should be done? Exactly what I stated earlier, try harder till you can get a hold of someone that actually understands your question and if you can't ask for help from either some devs or with one of the other big tech sites out there that already have a good relationship with the company and ask them to forward it to their contacts for you. It's really just that simple.

By troll posting these companies Michael makes us all look like fuckwits.

The Gigabyte tech support person who e-mailed Michael clearly does not know what he/she is writing about, when talking about chipset drivers. This person clearly does not know that the BIOS doesn't come from the chipset vendor, but from Gigabyte itself. Of course they got the BIOS from another company like AMI, Phoenix or Award. But still Gigabyte can fix this and Intel/AMD can't.

By the way, I think Michael should have mentioned ASRock as a vendor of motherboards with a good BIOS (now the topic mainly mentions the bad guys, giving the impression that the majority is bad). They claim, or used to claim, that their BIOS'es fully comply with the ACPI standard - I don't know if it is true but at least suspend, hibernate or ASPM problems are rare on ASRock. I have been using ASRock for years, having lots of problems with onboard sound and graphics but the BIOS was always working fine (or had an update to fix everything: for example AGP 4X support on my K7S41GX). I'd expect Asus to work as well as they also use American Megatrends (AMI) BIOS'es. Or are they using another BIOS today?

Sorry that was my oldest card, but as you can see the first bios for this card was from 2003.10.29 and it had support until 2009,
and now i have an asus m2n-e, first version that i found on asus site is from 2006.06.21 but is version 203 so is not the first one and last update is from 2010.06.25 , so my board is from around 2005 or 2004 and now i can use on it an am3 processor wich apered a year or 2 yeas ago.

I'm going to have to call BS on this one, not only do they have Q-Flash which is the easiest way to flash one's bios, since you just need to stick the bios file on a flash drive and reboot into Q-Flash instead of jerking around with freedos, but there has already been 6 steppings to the BIOS on my A75-UD4H.

My asus has this feature too, and I think had it for quite some while. Go into the bios, and let it update itself from the bios. Even emergency boot block recovery's are possible via usb these days.

Originally Posted by mark_

So let's create a blacklist for mainboards.
Also: what about coreboot? Will a chip with coreboot work flawlessly?

That, is what we really need. More money going to support coreboot and make it a very good replacement for the long old buggy bios.

Having said that, my Asus (great support uh?) appearantly has a buggy ACPI table which causes USB not to work on a 64bit kernel. 32bit works fine, and I'm assuming the other OS too, as otherwise people would have complained lots. I am going to contact asus tech support I guess somehow, whenever people from the linux-acpi can help me identify what the actual culprit is